It is anticipated that hand-held portable and mobile devices (such as mobile ‘phones, laptop computers and personal digital assistance (PDAs)) will have multiple communications interfaces including a short-range, high speed wireless network interface, and a slower-speed, wide area network interface. Thus, such a device may have a short-range, high-speed Bluetooth interface, and a slower-speed cellular telephone interface. Bluetooth is a short-range wireless protocol which operates at 2.45 GHz. Such a short-range wireless network (known as piconet) can support up to eight simultaneous devices, namely one master unit and seven slave units. This type of piconet can dynamically change as users enter and leave the range of the Bluetooth master unit.
Another known short-range wireless protocol is the wireless networking protocol IEEE802.11. Devices constructed in accordance with this protocol operate at 2.45 GHz, and a piconent can support a very large number of users. As with Bluetooth, such a piconet can dynamically change as users enter and leave the piconet.
With either of these two short-range wireless protocols, each member of a piconet can currently communicate outside the piconet at no more than the data transmission rate of a single wide area connection such as a cellular telephony connection or an internet access service (for example a data service for portable computers).
The aim of the invention is to allow members of a piconet to share each others wide area network interface in a co-ordinated fashion to obtain a single, logical, high-speed wide area network connection.